My Amazon Review of James Kaplan's "Irving Berlin: New York Genius"

 

Writing the American Songbook

 

James Kaplan has written an endearing biography of Irving Berlin, perhaps America’s best songwriter. Berlin born Israel Bailin in Belarus in 1888 arrives in America at age five and becomes a grade school dropout at fourteen.

He is a born hustler selling newspapers and singing in bars on the Bowery and by 1911 with his “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” he becomes America’s most celebrated songwriter over the next five decades.

 

Drafted into the army in 1918 he ends up organizing the “Yip Yank Yaphank” review with an all-soldier cast. It plays on Broadway to great acclamation. It was the precursor to his World War II “This is the Army” review.  By the 1920’s he is firmly established on Broadway and he owns 25% of the new Music Box Theater. He pens such songs as “Always” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” His 1933 “As Thousands Cheer” show co-stars the great Ethel Waters. She sings the tragic “Supper Times” portraying the lynching of her husband. This was the first integrated show on Broadway. A year later he would write “Easter Parade.”

 

By then Berlin would become bi-coastal with his work in Hollywood. One of his childhood friends ends up running a major studio. He goes back and forth with his second wife Ellen (his first wife dies early) and his three daughters. Along the way he works with the greats, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Further he drives very hard bargains with the Hollywood moguls. Berlin was a shrewd businessman as well.

 

In 1938 he pulls out a leftover song from “Yip Yap Yankhank” and that song becomes “God Bless America” which Kate Smith debuts to a national radio audience. ( See: - YouTube )  All the royalties would go to the boy scouts and girl scouts. With the start of the World War II, he organizes the “This is the Army” show where he travels the European and Pacific theaters being at times very close to live fire. The all-soldier unit was the only integrated army unit of the war.  Berlin donates his royalties to Army Relief. He still has time to compose “White Christmas” for Bing Crosby in 1942. During the war he meets Marshall, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Roosevelt.  At war’s end he receives the U.S. Army Medal of Merit directly from Marshall.

 

With the war over he writes the musical “Annie Get Your Gun.” In that show Ethel Merman belts out “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” He also writes in a fifteen-minute cab ride “Anything you can Do; I can do Better.”  His last Broadway show was “Call Me Madam.”

 

What can I say? Despite suffering from insomnia and depression he lived a full life, and his songs made our lives all the better. Kaplan’s biography makes him come alive.

For the full Amazon URL see: Writing the American Songbook (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Bridgett M. Davis' "The World According to Fanny Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers"

 

Love and Capital in Motown

Baruch College creative writing professor Bridgett M. Davis has written a loving biography of her mother Fanny and along the way a partial autobiography of herself and the Black experience in declining Detroit through the prism of the subculture around the numbers game. (Note: I received this book as a gift and although I have an association with Baruch College, I have not met the author.) Fanny Davis moves her family from Jim Crow Nashville to Detroit in the mid-fifties and the author, the last of five children is born there in 1960. It is through her eyes and the research that she had undertaken we see the larger-than-life Fanny Davis.

After winning a big 500-1 payout to the tune of $25,000 Fanny has the cash to “buy” (actually a land contract of sale because the neighborhood was redlined.) a house and is also taken with the idea of at first being a numbers bookie and then a numbers banker. All of this is illegal. For the uninitiated, the numbers game involves betting on three-digit number that is derived from the last digits of a parimutuel pool in a given race. The odds of winning are, of course, 1,000-1 while the payoff varies between 500-1 and 600-1 making the expected value of a $1 bet 50 or 60 cents. Thus, there is huge “vigorish” for the house. However, the house faces the risk of ruin if too much is bet on the winning number. It is the success of this business that enables the family to grow up with a middle-class lifestyle.

The author was born in 1960, the youngest of five children and she is treated like a princess. She wears fancy clothes, has lots of shoes and most importantly many books to read. There is an early incident where her first-grade teacher questions the number pairs of shoes she has and further questions how her family makes its money. Fanny soon puts her into her place. We see similar incidents in high end department stores where store clerks question Fanny’s ability to pay. She then either roles out $100 bills or a stack of credit cards.

Fanny and other members of the numbers reinvest their profits back into their businesses and into the community at large by founding legitimate businesses and funding the local NAACP and Urban League chapters. Capital accumulation occurs at different levels.

In 1972 new competition enters in the form of a legal state lottery. Fanny had to adjust her whole business strategy. In the parlance of today’s Wall Street, she creates a derivative bet on the state lottery. She allows people to bet with her on the same numbers, but she pays out 600-1 instead of 500-1 and because the activity is illegal the winning better avoids the income taxes associated with winning in the formal state lottery. Further the risk of ruin is gone, because if there were excessive betting on a given number, she laid off the bet with the official lottery. Again, using Wall Street terminology this is called delta hedging. In a different era, Fanny could very well have run a casino or worked as a trader on Wall Street. To highlight her acumen in that regard, she bought Chrysler stock when it was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1980.

We also see her family in turmoil as three of her children die young, her divorce from her first husband who moved with her from Nashville, and her dying of cancer. The author brought tears to my eyes as she recounted her Mom’s death.

All the events in the book are going on amidst Detroit’s long wave decline. The auto industry is collapsing, whites are fleeing the city and the crime rate skyrockets. Indeed, the house that the author grew up in was later vandalized and ultimately bulldozed. The triggering event was the 1967 riot where the Army was called in. I would disagree with the author that the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act was the trigger for the white flight. In my opinion the white flight was already underway and that the Fair Housing Act did not have the perverse effect of advancing racial segregation.

Although I largely focused on the business side of things, Bridgett Davis’ endearing story of her Mom is an American story of success and capital accumulation against the backdrop of a major American city in decline. I would end by noting that this story will soon(?) be a major motion picture. I can’t wait.

For the complete Amazon URL see:  Love and Capital in Motown (amazon.com)

Trump's Pardonpalooza Coming Christmas Eve

At a time when Christians worldwide are celebrating the birth of their savior and peace on earth and goodwill toward men, Donald Trump is likely to unleash a pardonalooza on the most corrupt and venal people he has associated with. Trump maybe so full of the Christmas spirit that he will actually pardon himself. We will see. What better time to hide his perfidy than on slowest news day of the year. My advice is that newsrooms should have more than a skeleton staff on duty that long weekend.

My Amazon Review of Nicholas Sargen's "JPMorgan's Fall and Revival: How the Wave of Consolidation Changed America's Premier Bank"

 

A Reflection on the House of Morgan

 

Nick Sargen, longtime Wall Street economist and a friend and former colleague, has written a personal memoir of his working at JPMorgan, a history of the financial markets from 1978-2005 and a too endearing recent history of JP Morgan and the strategic issues it faced in the late 20^th century.* To me it is a misnomer to call JPMorgan “America’s premier bank,” in that as of yearend 1976 Morgan, with $28 billion in assets was the fifth largest bank holding company with roughly one-third the assets of Bank of America and standing behind Citicorp, Chase Manhattan, and Manufacturers Hanover. Simply put JPMorgan’s past was brighter than its future.

 

Sargen arrives at Morgan in early 1978 with an economics Ph.D. from Stanford after a stint at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco where he specialized in international economics. He is thrust into a rapidly inflating global economy and the world of sovereign lending to Asia and Latin America and is taken under the wing of the banks lead international economist, the highly respected Rimmer De Vries. In the early 1980’s Morgan had a virtual murderers row of economists that included Dick Berner (later Morgan Stanley’s chief economist), Bill Dudley (later Goldman Sachs’ chief economist and later President of the NY Fed), and Steven Roach (later Morgan Stanley’s chief economist). It was quite the intellectual hothouse.

 

By 1982 the American banking system and JPMorgan found themselves facing the imminent default of a host of Latin American countries as their scheme to recycle petro-dollars went awry. For all practical purposes the banks were insolvent. Sargen whose early warning system at the San Francisco Fed signaled the crisis, was not heeded at Morgan and elsewhere as the lure of high spreads dazzled the commercial banker of that day. To me, of all banks, Morgan should have stayed away given its experience with the Dawes Plan of the 1920s which recycled German reparations payments. Morgan partner Tommy Lamont was in up to his eyeballs with German loans. Of course, that all came crashing down when the New York call money market sucked money in from all over the world and the Fed’s 1929 tightening brought that episode to an ignominious end. The Volcker tightening of 1979-82 had the same effect. Simply put, Morgan should have known better.

 

Sargen describes a very insular and elite coat and tie “WASP” culture that only hired from the best of schools. There is no way Morgan would have hired me as a Jewish street kid from Queens with a UCLA finance Ph.D.  Although it was somewhat of a culture shock when Sargen was lured away from Morgan to the rough and tumble shirt-sleeve culture of Salomon Brothers. Sargen arrived in 1984 and I arrived there two years later. There Sargen learned the power of Salomon’s trading floor and he was shocked to see the firm’s chairman John Gutfreund sitting at open desk right on the floor. A far cry from JPMorgan. While there Sargen witnessed the collapse of the dollar, the 1987 stock market crash and the Brady Plan for Latin debt and Salomon’s infamous treasury scandal. By 1991 he was looking for greener pastures and ended up running money for Prudential and then in 1995 he returned to Morgan to be the chief strategist for its Private Bank. All the while he keeps up with the fits and starts problems facing Morgan as it enters investment banking.

 

Sargen rightly notes that Morgan’s strategic dilemma was that its core strength of banking for America’s top corporations was being disintermediated by the Wall Street investment banks who picked off its clients by offering better terms and conditions via the short-term commercial paper and long-term capital markets. Morgan under the leadership of Lew Preston and Dennis Weatherstone understood the problem and began to build an investment bank skirting around the requirements of the Glass Steagall Act that limited commercial banks from underwriting securities. They were successful to a degree, but at great cost. According to Sargen, Morgan’s biggest strategic mistake was not buying State Street Bank in 1990 when it had the chance.

 

With the late 1990’s bull market in full swing Morgan is left behind. All the action is in the new economy, while Morgan is wedded to the old economy. Its stock lags and of a sudden Morgan becomes takeover bait. Sargen cites an interesting vignette when Morgan invites twenty something TheGlobe.com CEO to address their annual managing directors meeting. Krizelman addresses the crowd in jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. The game was over, and Chase Manhattan Bank would soon acquire Morgan. However, the culture class was enormous with Chase and Morgan people hating each other’s guts. It would only settle down after JPMorgan Chase would acquire Bank One bringing with it a star banker named Jamie Dimon. It would be Dimon who restores the franchise to its past glory, but in a completely unrecognizable incarnation. Sargen would be long gone by then.

 

Because I am a finance and history geek and was involved in many of the big events discussed in the book, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Nick’s account. However, I am not so sure about the general reader. It would have helped if either there was more discussion about all the Morgan executives named in the book, or alternatively dropping a host of names. It was confusing at times. Further it would have helped to have annual data on Morgan’s profitability metrics and stock price. Nevertheless, from my biased perspective it is well worth the read.

 

*-I received the book from Sargen.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Reflection on the House of Morgan (amazon.com)

 

My Amazon Review of Paul Jankowski's "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War"

 

From Postwar to Prewar

 

Brandeis University history professor has written a very dry academic book about the origins of World War II through the twin lenses of the 1932-34 League of Nations Geneva Disarmament Conference and 1933 London World Economic Conference. He spends most of the book on the disarmament conference. He not only covers the major powers, but he also covers Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

 

By mid-1932 the Versailles settlement was breaking down. Germany was given the right to rearm and reparations, for all practical purposes, were eliminated at the Lausanne Conference. Thus, before Hitler Germany was free to become a great power once again in Europe.

 

The lynchpins of the postwar era were the notion of collective security via the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaty which formalized borders in the west and the Kellogg-Briand Pact which in principle outlawed war. On the economic side the Dawes and Young plans of 1925 and 1929 established an orderly process, at least temporarily, for German reparations payments and the recycling of capital through American loans. This gives lie to the notion that the United States was isolationist in the 1920’s. Further the U.S. with observer status was an active participant in the disarmament talks in Geneva.

 

Nevertheless in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League sat idly by and allowed it to happen, so much for collective security. With Mussolini’s Italy hellbent to seize Ethiopia and Stalin’s Russia beginning to develop a major armaments industry, the disarmament conference was in major trouble. A rearmed Russia and Germany force the states in between to rearm as well. Simply put everyone is going their own way.

 

The fatal conceit of the disarmament conference was that if Europe could not agree with a Locarno in the east that would confirm the borders there, how could it possibly agree on a general disarmament. The coup de grace, is of course Hitler coming to power with his very aggressive aims towards eastern Europe.

 

The World Economic Conference does not get the attention it deserves. Faced with a global depression the leading countries of the world got together in London in June 1933. Britain left the gold standard in 1931, the U.S. had just left it in May 1933, and under the weight of the economic collapse and worldwide protectionism international trade went into a tailspin. The goal of the conference was to restore trade and some form of the gold standard. It failed miserably when President Roosevelt blew up the conference with a telegram and sent the American delegation home. Keynes applauded Roosevelt’s decision because any return to gold, would have put the global economy into a straitjacket by preventing the needed reflation. From the point of view of economics Keynes was correct, but from the point of view of politics it sent a signal to Hitler and Mussolini that the U.S. had withdrawn from Europe. Collective security was done for with the U.S. withdrawing from the world. America’s true isolation was in the 1930’s, not the 1920’s. As a result, the world moved decisively from a postwar to prewar world.

 

Jankowski’s lessons for today are obvious. America’s withdrawal from the world and Britain’s from Europe contain the same seeds of destruction we witnessed in the early 1930s. An all against all world ends badly. I only wish Jankowski wrote with more drama.

For the full amazon URL see: From Postwar to Prewar (amazon.com)

Trump's Big Lie and the Legacy of 1918 Germany

Donald Trump is following the playbook of the 1918 German Right with his big lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. Unfortunately, by saying it loud and saying it often a good chunk of his followers believes him and have sent him an astounding $175 million since election day.

 

Yesterday Jochen Bittner outlined the German history in an Op-Ed for the New York Times. (See Opinion | 1918 Germany Has a Warning for America - The New York Times (nytimes.com)  Bittner gets most of his history right with the German Army facing imminent defeat in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates on November 9 leaving the Reichstag in charge of the new Weimar government. It is that government believing in Wilson’s “Peace without Victors” and his Fourteen Points that signs an armistice with the allies on November 11. Where Bittner gets it wrong is that he said that armistice was signed by the German military. The key signatory was Mathias Erzberger, a politician for the Catholic Center Party, a foreign office official and two military officers representing the army and the navy. Erzberger would be assassinated three years later by a rightwing hit squad.

 

Because Germany was never physically invaded a rightwing myth was propagated that defeat came from a “stab in the back” orchestrated by the social democrats, the communists and, of course, the Jews. Instead of quickly dying out the myth grew after the Allies imposed harsh terms on Germany at Versailles in June 1919 and it became part and parcel of the vocabulary of every rightwing party, especially the Nazis. My guess is that like 1918 Germany, Trump’s $175 million is to keep his “They stole it” myth alive.

 

Perhaps more insidious and not mentioned by Bittner, was the success of the German Right in naming the Weimar government as “the November criminals.” This I fear is what Trump will do to President-Elect Biden and the Democrats next year. Once someone is branded a criminal anything goes, including violence. You can already see it in the physical threats made against former Trump officials and the dedicated state and local officials involved in the vote counting and certification processes.

 

We live in scary times and it behooves the Democrats and clear-eyed Republicans to go all out in counteracting Trump’s big lie.

My Amazon Review of Robert Harris' "V2"

 

Rocket Science: Offense and Defense

 

Historical novelist Robert Harris tells the story of the German V2 program and the British attempts to defeat it through the eyes of a German propulsion engineer Rudi Graf and a female British air force officer Kay Caton Walsh working to defeat it through photography and algebra. The novel opens with Walsh in bed with her married lover in London about to be hit by a V2.

 

The story goes back and forth between her studying the photographs of the German rocket center at Peenemunde and her calculating the rocket trajectories from a base in Belgium to  Holland where Graf is a civilian scientific officer in charge of the launches. Graf’s boss Wernher von Braun has a few walk-on roles in the drama.

 

Through it all we learn of the magnitude of the German rocket program that produced a functional weapon that was extraordinarily inaccurate. The technical brilliance is evident, but the program was done at the cost of thousands of slave laborers and it took 30 tons of potatoes in starving Germany to make enough alcohol to fuel one rocket. Graf is a good person caught up in the nightmare of Nazi aggression.

 

Walsh’s job in Belgium with her fellow female officers is utilize radar data taken from the German launches to its ultimate rocket landing in England. The rocket follows the path of a parabola and from that it was possible to calculate the point of launch. With that data British fighter bombers would target that site. However, the rocket’s guidance and control system was not impervious to the high winds it would face and thus would invariably blow off course. As a result, instead of hitting military and political targets the rockets destroyed housing.

 

This is the third Harris book I have reviewed with the first two being “An Officer and a Spy” ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert Harris', "An Officer and A Spy: A Novel" ) and “Munich.” (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert Harris' "Munich: A Novel") Though not as good V2 remains a good read.

For the full Amazon URL see: Rocket Science: Offense and Defense (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Dana Mills' "Rosa Luxemburg"

 

Red Rosa

 

Dana Mills, a self-proclaimed socialist feminist, has written a very hagiographic biography of the early 20^th Century socialist intellectual and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. At least to me, she has grafted her 21^st century politics of enviro-feminism on to Luxemburg’s world view. Luxemburg was a one of a kind rising from a middle-class Jewish family in Poland to become one of the leading socialist intellectuals overcoming the sexism of the day. However, Mills is practically silent on what made Rosa a socialist, a real failure of the book. Another failure is that the book is over-loaded with socialist jargon that tries even the most stout-hearted.

 

At a very young age she wrote a critique of Eduard Bernstein’s reformism which was to become the basis of European social democracy. She takes a no compromise position with capitalism. And nearly unprecedented for the times Luxemburg received a doctorate in law in Switzerland. From Switzerland she moves to Germany and becomes a member of the Social Democratic Party and takes up with one of its leaders, Leo Jogiches. Because of Jogiches family wealth Luxemburg acquires a taste for bourgeois lifestyle, not atypical.  Along the way she writes here opus “The Accumulation of Capital” on Marxist economics.

 

Mills rightly portrays Luxemburg as an internationalist. She opposes Polish nationalism and is a firm believer in proletarian internationalism. That belief falters as most of the working-class parties join hands in supporting their respective nations at the start of World War I.  Her internationalism puts her athwart the leading political force of the 20^th century, nationalism. In this sense she is more Trotsky then Lenin.

 

Luxemburg was a critic of the Leninism in Russia. She believed in a bottom up socialism, not the top down dictatorship of Lenin.  The problem is that full blown socialism can only be accomplished at the point of a gun.

 

After being released from jail in 1918 she joins up with Karl Liebknecht and others to form the German Communist Party. The antecedent of which was formed a few years early in opposition to World War I. She is part of the Spartakist faction that would lead a revolt against the nascent social democratic government. The Spartakists were brutally suppressed leading to her murder at the hands of the Freicorps. Here there is no criticism of the revolt. Why would any serious leftist oppose the first and very fragile social democratic government in Germany? That government had enough problems dealing with the Right that it had to face off against the Left. It reinforces my view that the worst thing that happened to the Left in the 20^th century was the Bolshevik Revolution which split the Left and hardened the Right.

 

Mills notes one of Luxemburg’s famous sayings: “freedom is the freedom for one who thinks different.” I only wish that were true of today’s Left with its odious cancel culture.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2SSCGZ7DTIJSQ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Chris Whipple's "The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future"

 

Inside the CIA

 

I am an avid reader of spy fiction and nonfiction. As a result, I looked forward to reading Chris Whipple’s history of the CIA through its directors from Richard Helms in the 1960’s through Gina Haspel of today. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Simply put his words do not come off the page and at times I was reluctant to pick up the book. The drama is not there.

 

The book is an outgrowth of a Showtime documentary written by Whipple with the same title. To be sure he covers the history highlighting the CIA’s initial success in Afghanistan and its massive failure to predict the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the disclosure of the “family jewels” during the congressional hearings of the 1970s. He interviews directors George Tenet of “slam dunk” fame, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus along with numerous high-level staffers.

 

A strength of the book is that he highlights the tension between the CIA with its masters in the White House and the Congress. In my opinion the two directors that successfully navigated those shoals were George H.W. Bush and Leon Panetta, both master politicians. Thus aside from being a master spy the CIA director has to be a master politician.

 

My problem with Whipple is that I believe he does not fully understand the how difficult the job is. There is so much information, much of it bad, coming at a CIA director making it extraordinarily difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. It would have been a far better book for him to sit in the shoes of a director during a period of crisis trying to evaluate the incoming information and then to deal with the process of presenting it to the president.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R27PBIIBLHD4J8/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Some Out of the Box Ideas for a Biden Unity Cabinet

 With the election behind us my thoughts now turn to what a Biden cabinet would look like, especially if he holds true to the unity theme he elucidated in his victory speech. The announced make up of the cabinet will be especially crucial in determining the winners in the Georgia Senate run-off where a decided move to the Left would all but elect the two Republican candidates.  Politico has just published their ideas as to who the front runners are for the major cabinet slots.  (See:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/07/joe-biden-cabinet-picks-possible-choices-433431) I would be very comfortable with Michele Flournoy at Defense, Lael Brainard at Treasury, Ernest Moniz at Energy, Tom Udall at Interior, and Heidi Heitkamp at Agriculture.

Now here are my out of the box choices for several cabinet positions.

Attorney General - Merrick Garland. He is a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court that failed to get a Senate vote. He worked in the Clinton justice department and prosecuted the Oklahoma City bomber. His appointment would remove the stench left by the current administration.

Labor - Mary Daly. She is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and trained a labor economist. Before that she was research director at the bank. She started her academic career with a high school GED and thus she will have much to teach us about workforce development.

Health and Human Services - David Feinberg, M.D. He currently heads up Google's efforts in healthcare. Before that he was CEO of Geisinger Health Systems in Pennsylvania and the UCLA Hospital and Clinics. He has the perfect background for dealing with congress in that he was trained as a child psychiatrist. 

Education - Andrew Yang. He is a former presidential candidate with a background in technology and understand the needs of a 21st century workforce. If anyone can shakeup a stultified education system, it is he.

Housing and Urban Development - Keisha Lance Bottoms. She is currently mayor of Atlanta and showed great stamina during the civil disturbances of last summers. She has first hand knowledge on the needs of diverse and growing cities.

Commerce - John Kasich. He is a former Republican congressman and governor of Ohio who actively supported Biden. He would  have the support of the business community.

Transportation - Charlie Baker. He is the extraordinarily popular Republican governor of Massachusetts which has had more than its fair share of transportation issues. He gets results.

National Security Advisor - Fiona Hill. She was formerly a high staffer on the National Security Council who testified at Trump's impeachment trial. She literally wrote the book on Putin. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-amazon-review-of-fiona-hill-and.html)

Director of National Intelligence - Adam Schiff. He currently chairs the House Intelligence Committee.

National Economic Council - Greg Ip. He is The Wall Street Journal's lead economic commentator. He is knowledgeable on macro and micro issues and knows all of the players. He would truly be an honest broker. 

After Action Report on the 2020 Elections

While Shulmaven got Joe Biden winning right, I largely blew it everywhere else. Like too many, I got sucked into believing that the pollsters corrected for their mistakes in the 2016 election. Never again will I make that mistake.

 

I had Biden winning the popular vote by 7 points when it now looks like he will win it by 3 points. I had Biden winning Florida and North Carolina; wrong! I had him winning Arizona and Nevada, likely. And I had him winning Georgia, still too close to call.

 

With respect to the Senate I had the Democrats gaining a net of 5 seats. As of today, the Democrats are up one seat with two seats to be determined in a January runoff in Georgia. Shulmaven would sure like to own a TV station in Atlanta. It is my guess today that the Republicans are likely to hold both seats.

 

In the House I had the Democrats picking up 8-10 seats; it now looks like they will lose 8-10 seats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will soon find out what it was like for her Republican predecessors Ryan and Boehner to run an unruly caucus. It will not be pretty for her. 

To me the big takeaways from the election are:

1.     The Trump tactic of tagging the Democrats as radical leftists worked. Defunding the police and talking about socialism might work in New York, but not too many places elsewhere. Instead of being a plus, “the Squad” turned out to be a huge negative.

 

2.     The notion of a monolithic bloc of “people of color” crashed and burned. There are more differences than commonalities among African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians. For example, it certainly did not help when Black Lives Matter protestors in Miami carried a flag with Che Guevara’s picture on it. To them it may have been a symbol of liberation, but to Miami’s Cuban and Venezuelan populations it was a symbol of totalitarian oppression.  Outside of Florida Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas shifted markedly towards Trump.

 

3.     Biden’s position on fracking cost the Democrats two rising stars in the House, Kendra Horn from Oklahoma and Xochitl Torres-Small from New Mexico. *

 

4.     California, a state which voted for Biden by a 2-1 majority rallied against liberalism in three key ballot propositions and likely a fourth one. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2020/10/some-thoughts-on-four-controversial.html) Specifically the voters opposed a measure allowing for racial preferences in university admissions and state employment, opposed a measure that would allow for stricter rent control, supported a measure that treats gig workers as contractors rather than employees and thus far the opposition to amending Proposition 13 to allow for much higher taxes on commercial property is heading for defeat.

 

What the election seems to represent is that 2016 was not a fluke. America remains a very divided country and with Donald Trump acting like the world’s worst sore loser is certainly not helping things. We are  a country in a great need of spiritual healing. We must listen to one another, and I pray that Joe Biden will find the strength in him to lead us in that task.

 

*I financially supported her re-election efforts.

2020 Elections: A Good Night for Biden and the Democrats, a Bad Night for Trump

 

At last the election is just two days away. The way it looks to me, consistent with the recent polling data, is that Joe Biden will win the popular vote by a margin of 52-45-3 percent and it now looks like he will decisively win the battle for the electoral college by a margin of 350-188. I have Biden winning all the Clinton states of 2016 and adding Arizona, Florida, Georgia (yes), North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2^nd congressional district. His majority will be based on the votes of suburban women with the biggest gender gap ever, Blacks, seniors and the young. In House races, the Democrats are likely to pick up a net of between 8-10 seats. This will largely replicate the strength in the suburbs that occurred 2018 with a few seats coming from North Carolina’s redistricting.

 

The call for the Senate is much trickier. Put bluntly there are way too many extremely close races that can go either way. My best guess is that will pick up a net gain of five seats bringing their majority to 52-47 with one seat awaiting a Georgia runoff in January. I have the Democrats losing the Jones seat in Alabama while picking up Cunningham in North Carolina, Kelly in Arizona, Ossoff in Georgia, Bullock in Montana (an upset), Hickenlooper in Colorado and Gideon in Maine. In case of Gideon we probably will not know until next week to allow for Maine’s ranked choice voting tabulation.

 

HEALTH WARNING: The Senate races will be really close and as result there will be a high margin of error. If I am roughly right on the presidential race and if the Republicans do much better than I have predicted my explanation would be that enough Republican crossover voters and independents voted Republican fearing that a Democratic Senate would lead to packing the Supreme Court and runaway liberal legislation.

My Amazon Review of Ben Macintyre's "Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy"

Housewife by Day, Spy by Night

 

I gave a rave review to Ben Macintyre’s “The Spy and the Traitor” two years ago and trust me, I was not disappointed with his “Agent Sonya.”  (  See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2018/10/my-amazon-review-of-ben-macintyres-spy.html) Macintyre tells the story of young Weimar Berlin communist who grew up in an upper middle class household who would go on to become one of the Soviet Union’s greatest spies rising to the rank of colonel in the GRU and the posthumous recipient of an award from none other than Vladimir Putin himself.  

 

Macintyre traces Sonya’s (born Ursula Kuczynski) career from street fights with the Nazis in Berlin to following her architect husband to Shanghai, Manchuria and Chunking and then on to Sparrow school (GRU training) in Moscow to Warsaw to Geneva and then to England.  Along the way she gives birth to three children from three separate fathers two of whom she was married to.

 

She is recruited initially by the feminist author and spy Agnes Smedley in Shanghai, but she does not become fully involved until she meets and has an affair with the super spy Richard Sorge  who would go on to become Moscow’s man in Tokyo. (See: shulmaven.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-amazon-review-of-owen-matthews.html )In Chunking she meets the then Soviet military attaché General Vasily Chuikov who would go on to lead the invasion of Berlin in 1945.   

 

In Geneva, now with two children, Sonya sets up a spy ring to penetrate Germany. In fact, her two British spies come upon a Munich restaurant frequented by Hitler. They plot to assassinate Hitler but with the German invasion of Poland they must flee Germany before anything can be done.  One incident in Geneva really stands out is that eight hours after the birth of her second child, she is sending coded short-wave transmissions to Russia. Sonya faced a crisis of confidence with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which put a halt on her spying on the hated Nazis. Nevertheless, she ultimately sticks with the GRU likely because she was addicted to risk.

 

Sonya makes her bones in England where she controls the noted atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. From as early as 1940 Sonya is transmitting secrets from Britain’s Tube Alloys atomic program. Fuchs would stay in England until 1943 when the Brits join America’s atomic program in Los Alamos. Sonya sets up the transfer of Fuchs to the KGB operation in America that is running the Rosenberg spy ring. Fuchs’ contact was Harry Gold.

 

All the while Sonya is running Fuchs, she lives the life of normal housewife with three children in the English countryside. By day she takes care of the kids and bakes cakes and scones. By night and with occasional trips to London and bicycle rides to dead drops she is a spy. She is so successful that when the OSS decides to parachute German nationals to spy on Germany, they are all under her indirect control.

 

To be sure Britain’s MI-5 was aware of her, but they could not believe that the mild-mannered housewife was a spy. But then again this was the same MI-5 that missed the notorious Cambridge Five, one of who was Kim Philby who at times aided Sonya.

 

There is much more to the story than what I have discussed above. There is Sonya’s interactions with her father, brother and her three lovers and I have left out how and where she ends up. Macintyre has written a truly engrossing story that reads like a novel.

For the full Amazon review see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R8KA5Y59P69S8/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Biden vs. Trump: Round 2

 Compared to their first debate, last night's debate could be characterized as "normal." Put bluntly Trump was well behaved and he more or less followed the rules of debate and Biden remained largely unflappable. If you came into the debate supporting Trump you thought he won. Similarly if you came into the debate supporting Biden you thought he won. So roughly speaking the debate was close to a draw with Trump beating the very low expectations most people had for him. Although Trump appeared to hold his own on the COVID portion of the debate, the facts on the ground demonstrate his complete ineptitude in handling the pandemic.

Biden made an unforced error in his call for a complete transition away from oil and for an explicit ban on fracking on public lands. This will cost him votes in Texas and perhaps Pennsylvania. My guess is that any hope that Biden had from pulling an upset in Texas went down the drain last night. It also has the potential of hurting Democrats in down ballot races in the oil and gas producing states.

Nevertheless with the Biden in the lead with less then two weeks to go, Trump failed in his major objective to shake up the race. Indeed whatever he gained from his civility last night, will be lost when 60 Minutes runs their interview with him on Sunday night. 

The clear winner in the debate was moderator Kristin Welker. She was in full command and had the whip hand with the ability for the control room to turn off the debate microphones. I called attention her star quality and three of her NBC colleagues three years ago in a blog post. (See https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2017/09/from-murrows-boys-to-oppenheims-girls.html)

My Amazon Review of Peter Baker's and Susan Glasser's "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III"

 

The Realist

 

Husband and wife journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have written tour de force biography Jim Baker who was perhaps the most consequential appointed politician of the past five decades. Baker was consequential because he understood the role of politics is to govern and Baker sure knew how to use the instruments of power to successfully govern in support of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

 

Baker and Glasser spent eight years on the project and they had the full cooperation of Baker. They not only discuss Baker’s public life, but we get a real sense of his private life as well. The authors had access to Baker’s lover letters to his first wife who bore him four children and died way too young of cancer. We then see Baker marrying one of his wife’s friends who brings three children to the marriage. It truly was a Brady bunch with an eighth child thrown in later. Baker was a devoted husband, but his children suffered from a myriad of problems involving drugs which were not helped by Baker’s absence caused by his very public life.

 

Jim Baker is scion of the Houston establishment. Until his late 30’s he had no interest in politics while he was building a very successful law practice. He enters politics through his tennis buddy, George H.W. Bush who was elected as a congressman from Houston. They essentially become brothers along with the sibling rivalry that entails. As Bush rises in Washington, so too does Baker. So much so that Baker runs Ford’s 1976 campaign for president and he then runs Bush’s primary campaign in 1980. After Reagan’s nomination Baker becomes a key figure in Reagan’s campaign that leads him to becoming his chief of staff.

 

It is generally recognized that Baker set the gold standard for White House chiefs of staff. While working for Reagan he controls the various factions within the White House and puts together a congressional coalition to pass Reagan’s economic package through Congress in 1981. He also keeps a lid on an effort to militarily intervene in Nicaragua during the first term. His absence in Reagan’s second term opened the way to the Iran-Contra scandal that almost brought down the Reagan presidency. His one black mark as chief of staff was his attempted bullying of Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

 

In 1984 Baker runs Reagan’s successful “Morning in America” reelection campaign and he then moves on to become Secretary of the Treasury. As treasury secretary he pushes through Reagan’s monumental 1986 tax reform act. The authors ignore the key role that Houston’s Rice University economist on leave to the treasury Charles McLure had in fashioning the underlying framework for the new tax law.

 

Baker also was the architect of the 1985 Plaza Accord that orchestrated a global policy to devalue the dollar. That was done without Volcker, a mistake in my opinion. The authors ignore two key side effects of the accord. First it created a sea of global liquidity that created the Japan stock bubble and led to a flood of money into the global real estate market. Both Japanese stocks and global real estate would crash in 1990. Second the weaker dollar led to a temporary renaissance in Midwest manufacturing which would become of great help to H.W. Bush’s election in 1988. Baker then resigned as Treasury Secretary and ran Bush’s presidential campaign.

 

In 1989 Baker becomes Secretary of State where he orchestrates a successful end of the Cold War and German reunification. We also see Baker hiring Democrats on his staff including Dennis Ross. Along the way makes friends with Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. While dealing with German reunification issues Iraq invaded Kuwait triggering the first Gulf War. Baker organizes an international coalition and gets Russia to go along and China to abstain at a critical U.N. meeting. With the Gulf War over Baker tried to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This led to the Madrid Conference of 1992 which ultimately paved the way to the 1993 Rabin-Arafat meeting in 1993. To me his strong arming of Israel was a bit much, but it did get results.

 

With the 1992 Bush campaign in disarray Baker returns to the White House. His efforts were to no avail as Bush lost to Clinton. He then goes back to private life where he spends much time working for private equity giant Carlyle Group relaxing at his primitive Wyoming ranch.

 

With the Florida recount jeopardizing the 2000 election of George W. Bush, Baker is called back into action to aid the Bush family. He organizes the Bush efforts and puts together an all-star legal pick up team consisting of now Senator Ted Cruz, now Chief Justice John Roberts and now Justice Brett Kavanaugh. They win in the Supreme Court with Republican super-lawyer Ted Olson arguing the case.

 

After that Baker returns to private life, but he still finds the time to co-head an Iraq study commission in 2007. He his now 90 and Baker and Glasser shine a light on his personality and his service to our country.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3NOZ2CCBLTG9M/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Some Thoughts on Four Controversial California Ballot Measures

 Although I haven't lived in California for decades, I remain close to the state through my research efforts and the many friends who live there. Further, because California has historically led the Nation with its legislative approaches, the results of this year's election could very well have nationwide consequences. Below you will find my views on four of the ballot propositions.

Proposition 15 - Vote NO

This proposition would overturn Proposition 13 by stepping the property tax basis for commercial and industrial property to current market values. The measure would raise about $10 billion a year. In the middle of a pandemic recession it hardly makes sense to raise taxes whose burden would especially hit the devastated retail, restaurant and office tenant sectors with a substantial increase in tax pass-throughs. The money raised would go to inflate the state's already bloated public sector bureaucracies. I would feel much better about the measure if its proceeds were used to lower income and sales taxes.

Proposition 16 - Vote NO

This proposition would repeal the 1996 Proposition 209 which eliminated the use of affirmative action in college admissions. Simply put, given the high Asian enrollment at the University of California, the measure would, in effect, be a 21st Century version of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Proposition 21 - Vote NO

This proposition would allow local jurisdictions to adopt an extreme form of residential rent control which would allow controlling rents based on the unit, rather than the tenancy. In a time when rents are falling, the measure would actually work to keep rents high because owners would be reluctant to cut rents today in fear that rents could not be increased in the future. Further the measure would place all units more than 15 years old to be covered on a rolling basis, compared to current law which covers only those units build prior to 1995. In a nutshell apartment construction would be reduced and the housing shortage in California would be exacerbated.

Proposition 22 - Vote YES

This proposition would repeal AB-5 that classified Uber, Lyft and Door Dash drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Since it emergence over a decade ago the the ride hailing platform industry has offered huge convenience for the public and offered income opportunities to hundreds of thousands of contractors. The essence of the platforms requires flexibility for both the contractor and its contractors. By converting contractors to employees, the business model would be stultified at a cost to both the public and the companies. Thus repeal of AB-5 is necessary. 

My Amazon Review of Robert Galbraith's "Troubled Blood (A Cormoran Strike Novel)

 Cold Case

As I write this there are 2,700 reviews on Amazon for J.K. Rowling’s writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith fifth Cormoran Strike novel. Galbraith continues to tell the saga of private As detective Cormoran Strike and his now partner Robin Ellacott in their pursuit of a 40-year-old cold case. A 30-year-old doctor and former Playboy bunny and the mother of a one-year old girl Margot Bamborough disappeared 40 years before in 1974 under very mysterious circumstances. It was assumed that she was murdered by a cross-dressing psychopathic serial killer, but her body was never recovered.

 

Strike and Ellacott are hired by the now 40-year-old daughter to uncover exactly what happened. Along the way have a series of deep character studies of the protagonists, the serial killer, the police detectives who originally investigated the case, and running down assorted suspects from four decades ago. Especially moving is Strike’s relationship with his Aunt Joan who was dying of cancer and her family. Aunt Joan raised Strike as a boy after being abandoned by both his parents. We also are a witness to the increasingly close relationship between Strike and Robin and Galbraith gets you into their heads.

 

The author tells a great story and there is much more here than the primary case, but the book at 944 pages in the print edition is a bit too long for my taste.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RDWACXWYCIFOM/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Harris vs. Pence: The Match in the Wasatch

Last night's vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris in Salt Lake City was far more civil the the Biden-Trump rumble of a week ago. The way I scored it is that Harris won on points but she failed to meet the lofty expectations of her campaign. Pence with more than a few lies, held his own.

Harris rightly made the debate a referendum on Trump's handling of the COVID-19 debacle and Pence tried to make it choice between Trump and the perceived leftwing inclinations of the Democrats. He made the case for Trump far better than Trump did a week ago, by highlighting Harris' prior anti-fracking and pro-Green New Deal stances. However Pence failed to say the Trump campaign would accept the consequences of a Biden election. And Harris ducked the question of whether a Biden Administration would support packing the Supreme Court.

Both candidates ducked moderator Susan Page's question as to what abortion regime would they support for their respective states should Roe v. Wade be overturned by the Supreme Court. Harris did not want to come out in favor of no restrictions on abortion and Pence did not want to come out in favor of complete restrictions. They do represent the polar opposites on that issue.

As a result I don't think the debate changed any minds and given Trump's statement today that he will not participate in a virtual debate, last night's event was likely the last debate of the campaign, a campaign that Biden is now likely to win.

Biden vs. Trump: Round 1

 Although it was not quite "The Thrilla in Manila" or "The Rumble in the Jungle," the debate had many of the aspects of the prize fights of yore. Trump came out wildly swinging and breaking every debate rule in the book, while Biden tried to maintain a modicum of composure. Although Biden's performance will not put him the presidential debate hall of fame, he held his own and that was enough for him to walk away as the winner. Proof of that came the next day when Trump moved toward Pelosi's position on a large stimulus package. He can't afford the economy and the stock market to weaken in October.

Simply put Trump is running scared and unlike 2016, he now has much to lose. In fact it is not out of the question to see him in an orange jump suit in 2021. Trump's refusal to condemn the racism of the Proud Boys and his green lighting of post-election violence on their part with his "stand back and stand by" comments was chilling.

To me Trump's out of control on stage behavior likely turned off nearly every woman viewer of the debate. The vision of an out of control man is hardly reassuring. Thus the the gender gap this year will be a mile wide.

To those who fear that Trump will not accept defeat in November I would express my faith in America's military where there is a duty NOT to obey an unlawful order.

As to Biden he separated himself from the looney left of his party by standing clear of the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and defunding the police. He should have been firmer on "law and order," but he will have more than a few opportunities to make his views known. 

Finally if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, the evangelical right could treat Trump the way he treats them. They are now free to toss him overboard now that they have gotten the Supreme Court they wanted.

My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945

 

Hitler’s War

 

This is Volker Ullrich’s second and very long volume (848 pages in the print edition) of his very detailed biography of Adolph Hitler. (See my review of Volume 1 at  https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2016/12/my-amazon-review-of-volker-ullrichs.htm) This volume starts after Hitler’s acquisition of Memel in March 1939, his last peaceful acquisition of territory in Europe. Because Hitler’s life is so enmeshed with the war in Europe, the volume is also a history of World War II from a German perspective. Much of his accounts come from the diaries of Hitler Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who figures prominently in the book.

 

Hitler’s goals were to conquer Europe and the destruction of European Jewry. He almost succeeds with the first and is very successful in slaughtering the Jews of Europe in the holocaust. Hitler’s war in the East is a war of annihilation starting first in Poland and then in Russia. In the West Hitler works with generals Manstein and Guderian (the architect of Blitzkrieg warfare) in coming up with the strike at France through the Ardennes forest which works to destroy the French army. Far from being a dilettante, Hitler knows his maps and military strategy. These abilities would decay as the war went on. Thus, as victory turned to defeat Hitler would increase his micromanagement of the war and remove generals with great alacrity.

 

Although Hitler never gave a direct order for the holocaust, his minions knew exactly what he wanted to be done. At the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 the order was given to kill the Jewish population of Europe. This comes after the failure of Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union in the fall of 1941. Had Barbarossa succeeded one of he plans was to exile Europe’s Jews to the steppes of Russia. Instead the Jews went off to the camps and in late 1944 the hitherto relatively safe 400,000 Jews of Hungary were rounded up and sent off to their deaths.

Hitler knew that Germany lost the war at Stalingrad but continues the slaughter because his war of annihilation made a negotiated settlement with him impossible. After Stalingrad morale in Germany breaks and Hitler’s health rapidly deteriorates.

 

Ullrich is very good at describing the failed Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 and its aftermath. However, we learn very little about Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun, his mistress. Both she and Hitler commit suicide along with the Goebbels family in the bunker in 1945.

 

The most haunting passage in the book is Ullrich’s description of Hitler in January 1945. He writes as follows, “several of his character traits had become even more pronounced his egocentrism, his inability to self-criticize, and his commensurate tendency to overestimate himself, his lack of scruples when choosing means to his ends, his habit of betting everything on a single card, his contempt for others and his lack of empathy.”  This sounds like someone we know.

 

The book is a long slog, but worth it for readers who want a better understanding of Hitler and World War II.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RRHJACHZBT72K?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

My Amazon Review of Michael Cohen's "Disloyal: A Memoir.........."

 

The Fixer

 

Michael Cohen fancied himself as Donald Trump’s fixer, and to some extent he was. He describes his early life and his over decade of working for Trump. However I was deeply disappointed with is book because there is very little new here. We all know that Trump is a liar and a cheat; he even cheated Cohen.

 

What is missing is that there is very little detail on the inner workings of the Trump Organization. There is much that he is not telling. He also tells us very little about how he achieved a modicum of success prior to working for Trump and there is nary a word on the impact of Uber/Lyft on his taxi medallion business which has likely gone into the toilet.

 

We do learn how Cohen did favors for Jerry Falwell Jr. which paid big dividends for Trump with the evangelical community in 2016. Specifically he got VIP tickets for his daughter for a Justin Beaver concert and he kept a lid on Falwell’s wife’s dalliance with a Florida pool boy, a scandal that would blow up later. And I did learn that Trump aide Hope Hicks had an affair with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

 

Most unsettling is the constant pleading of his wife Laura and daughter Samantha to quit working for Trump. His family knew what Trump was far better than him. However, Cohen was totally and willingly seduced by Trump. Trump has his charms and I did meet him once nearly three decades ago in business meeting. The charm was there, but there was no way my firm was going to do business with him.

 

There is some merit as to his complaints about his treatment from the U.S Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. But then again he was not prosecuted for lying to the Congress the first time he testified.

 

Thus there is not much here for a reader who is somewhat knowledgeable about Trump and his business career prior to becoming President.

For the complete Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1LOOZHMAOKCL0/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Trump Admits to Criminal Negligence

On May 15 I posted a blog entitled "Criminal Negligence in the White House with respect to President Trump's handling of the COVID-19 crisis. (  See:https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2020/05/criminal-negligence-in-white-house.html)  Today the Washington Post published excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book "Rage" where Trump admits he lied to the American people about the severity of COVID-19 knowing that it was "deadly" and deliberately delayed any meaningful response to the disease for over six weeks costing countless lives.(https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bob-woodward-rage-book-trump/2020/09/09/0368fe3c-efd2-11ea-b4bc-3a2098fc73d4_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-high_woodward-1210p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans&itid=hp_hp-top-table-high_woodward-1210p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans)

What we have here is an open and shut case of criminal negligence where the voters have no choice but to throw Trump out of office and for a future attorney general to file charges against all of the responsible parties including Trump's sycophants in the White House and in Congress. Blood is on all their hands.

My Amazon Review of Rick Pearlstein's "Reaganland: America Turns Right, 1976-1980"

 

Reagan Ascendant

 

Rick Pearlstein, a man of the Left, has written a very long (1120 pages in the print edition) and very important history of American politics from 1976-1980 through the twin lenses of the flowering of the American Right and Reagan’s successful campaign for the presidency. This is his fourth volume on the history of the modern American Right that starts in the 1950’s. (See my earlier review of his “The Invisible Bridge…” https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/08/my-amazon-review-of-rick-pearlsteins.html) As with his prior volumes he is very good at discussing the day-to-day politics of the era. The liberals were literally out of gas and there was a thunder on the Right led by the evangelical community, the revival of business lobbying and the new ideas coming from the neoconservatives. Standing athwart all of this was the hapless Jimmy Carter who found a way to upset the liberals on his left and the moderates on his right which leads to a challenge by Senator Edward Kennedy.

 

Pearlstein delivers terrific portraits of John Connally, Nixon’s Treasury Secretary and presumed Republican front runner in 1979, and anti-Equal Rights Amendment firebrand Phyllis Schlafly who successfully organizes the Right to defeat the amendment. We see the young Paul Manafort and Roger Stone practicing their dark arts that would become the basis of a powerful political consulting firm in the 1980s whose lives would turn into ignominy with the election of Donald Trump. We also see the rise of the direct mail wizard Richard Vigueri and his cohorts on the Right, Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich.

 

The religious Right draws its strength from its opposition to abortion and gay rights. In its opposition to abortion American Protestants linkup with Catholics for the first time to form a powerful urban-rural coalition which undermines Democratic dominance of the eastern and Midwestern urban centers. In their opposition to gay rights, the Right finds a spokesperson in singer Anita Bryant who leads the charge to repeal a Miami gay rights ordinance.

 

Through it all we see Ronald Reagan methodically plodding along his path to the presidency with the ups and downs of his campaign culminating with his debate win over Jimmy Carter. To be sure he fires his first campaign manager, the egotistical John Sears and there are many gaffes along the way, but Reagan is opportunistic enough make a major issue out of the Panama Canal Treaty as sign of American retreat. Of course he and the Republican Party is helped along when everything falls off the tracks in 1979. We have the Iranian Revolution, the tripling of the price of gasoline, gas lines, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Iranian hostage crisis.

 

What Pearlstein misses is the sociological earthquake that was happening the 1970’s that gave rise to the religious Right. For example the birthrate collapsed from a peak of 4.3 million births in 1957 to a low of 3.1 million in 1975 with a modest increase to 3.6 million by 1980. The number of divorces more than doubled from 500,000 in 1970 to 1,200,000 in 1980 and the number of legal abortions increased from 500,000 in 1971 to 1,300,000 in 1980. There was good reason for Americans to be worried about the traditional family.

 

And if you overlay that on an increase in the female labor force participation rate from 43% in 1970 to 51% in 1980 which meant that the traditional one breadwinner household was falling further and further behind you can add an economic reason for the growing disenchantment of evangelical Christians. Now overlay that with a double-digit inflation you have a formula for deep resentment. To quote Karl Marx, “all that is solid melts into air.” That was the America of 1980.

 

To focus more on the economic side of things the roaring inflation was forcing the average worker into higher and tax brackets, a product of a tightly bracketed tax code. Further, if a second family member entered the labor force the marginal tax rate could very well be as high as 40%. Then of a sudden, the California tax revolt leads to the passage of Proposition 13 which cut property taxes by 60%. Pearlstein is very good with his discussion of this. I was in the middle of it and was quoted in the Howard Jarvis Time magazine cover story that he cites. Its passage gives succor to the Republicans in Congress supporting the Kemp-Roth 30% across the board income tax cut. That will pass later under Reagan.

 

However Pearlstein leaves out three critical factors as to the cause of Proposition 13. First the tax revenue coming in from rising property values was spent by government, not rebated in the form of lower rates. Second, the Crawford vs. L.A. Board of Education decision calling for crosstown busing made the local school less important to the typical suburban voter. Similarly the Serrano vs. Priest decision equalizing school finance detached local property taxes from support of local schools. Both those decisions took place in the early 1970’s which rendered ineffective the anti-Prop 13 message that the schools would be destroyed if the measure passed.

 

One thing that really bothers me about the book is Pearlstein’s reference to corporate lobbyists as “boardroom Jacobins.” He fails to understand that the real Jacobins were in the regulatory agencies who running a regulatory reign of terror against the business community. To be sure much regulation was needed, but the way they went about with little attention paid to cost/benefit analysis created a tough adversarial environment. Further effective business taxation was on the rise because the great inflation was rendering depreciation allowances woefully inadequate and stock prices measured in real terms collapsed. Even Senator Kennedy was supportive of increasing depreciation allowances and he said so in response to me at a rally in Los Angeles.

 

As far as the average industrial worker was concerned the Democratic Party was nowhere to be found. On September 16, 1977 the Youngstown Sheet and Tube factory closed firing 5,000 workers in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley. Within a few years 50,000 steel jobs were lost. The Democrats controlled the White House and had huge majorities in both houses of Congress. They did nothing and it is no wonder that Reagan got the bulk of their votes in 1980. Pearlstein does not mention this.

 

The Reagan we see in Pearlstein’s book is sunny optimist. He is pro-immigration, pro-trade and was way ahead of his time with respect to NAFTA and he had live and let live with respect to gay rights. He opposed the Briggs Amendment, a California anti-gay measure on the ballot in 1978. Thus the Reagan of 1980 is a far cry from the Republican Party of today. Simply put there is no way the wackos in today’s Republican Party would nominate him.

 

Rick Pearlstein gives us great history. It very detailed and well sourced. Despite my quibble above it is a must read for serious students of America’s political culture.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RTGEJNHPIBVNP/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv